


Flame and Air

by givesmevoice



Category: Sex Education (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jakob's hero origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22644268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givesmevoice/pseuds/givesmevoice
Summary: She was nothing at all like his wife. Jean Milburn was flame and air, hardly a real person on the same earthly plane as him. (Though she was painfully real as he brushed past her to go through her front door. Indescribably real and close when she smelled his head, when the hem of her dress got caught on her shoe and he caught a glimpse of nearly her entire leg. Then he was reminded that she was all too real.) No, Jean was air. Adela had been earth.
Relationships: Jakob Nyman/OFC, Jean Milburn/Jakob Nyman
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	Flame and Air

Dr. Jean Milburn hadn’t been what he expected at all. He couldn’t believe that he was so easily charmed by her. By this small, white-blonde woman waving away a sneeze as she opened her front door. By this woman who had forgotten he was coming to redo her bathroom and assumed he was a patient with scrotal anxiety of all things. Jakob wished he was more internet savvy, or that he could ask one of his daughters to look up this woman and what she did and who she was, because she was the strangest and most fascinating woman he had ever come across. She was like quicksilver - she simultaneously poured her thoughts out in an unguarded conversation on his first day on the job and seemed to hide behind her job, her intellect. She was somehow both completely real and total artifice: honest and probing attention to her patients matched with a voice cultivated to stay calm and level, not betray any spikes in emotion. She seemed as though she could take flight or evaporate any second.

She was nothing at all like his wife. Jean Milburn was flame and air, hardly a real person on the same earthly plane as him. (Though she was painfully real as he brushed past her to go through her front door. Indescribably real and close when she smelled his head, when the hem of her dress got caught on her shoe and he caught a glimpse of nearly her entire leg. Then he was reminded that she was  _ all too real _ .) No, Jean was air. Adela had been earth.

His wife had been dead for nearly four years, sick for two years before then. Jakob had devoted every waking moment to her care, to Rikke and Ola’s well-being. Rikke was studying for uni, working hard after school to bring in extra money that Jakob was ashamed to admit they needed. Ola, just 12 then, had helped her father so devotedly, with compassion beyond her years. Adela and Jakob had always spoken openly and honestly with their girls, encouraged them to not hide their emotions, to choose their words carefully when expressing themselves, to know that what they were saying could never be taken back. Adela knew she was going to die. She told Jakob, she told Rikke, she told Ola. There was no fear, no wavering in her voice. She knew. She was certain. She had always been certain,  _ she had always been certain _ , she had always been honest. She told Jakob once, when they first met, that she couldn’t believe she had met someone in Britain (a place renowned for contrived politeness) who could match her own propensity for saying exactly what she felt and thought.  _ Yours might even be a more brutal and tender honesty. Is that a Scandinavian thing, do you think? Does the cold weather help hone your honesty? _

He’s come to realize, especially watching Jean dance around her feelings, her attraction to him, that maybe what he and Adela had in common was that they simply weren’t British. Jean was smart and beautiful and obviously very confident in herself and her professional life, but he wondered if she had ever said exactly what she felt or needed. He couldn’t imagine that voice, that beautifully glacial voice, expressing true anger or fear, desperation or hurt. He wonders what Adela would have thought about Jean. He considers that Adela probably would have liked her, despite their obvious differences. Adela would like that Jean devotes herself to others’ happiness, that her career is also in service of others. She definitely would have been interested in reading some of the books Jean had written.

He had met Adela shortly after arriving from Sweden. Working as a line cook in a Vietnamese restaurant in Brixton, he was incredibly far out of his comfort zone. He loved it though; it was an opportunity to live fearlessly. What did he have to lose as a heavily-tattooed Swedish emigrant working in a Vietnamese restaurant in a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in London? Adela lived in Brixton, came to the restaurant after her shift at the hospital, her feet sore from standing, walking, running all day. She’d order phở in the cold months, bánh mì in the summer. Started waving to him, a big smile on her face, when she saw him in the kitchen. His English was poor (his Vietnamese slightly better), but her warmth and sturdy presence drew him to her. She had a lilting voice and he enjoyed the way she wrapped it around his name. He can sense she’s deeply rooted in who she is, in where she is - he wants to set his roots down beside hers.

Jakob wonders if Jean is intimidated by him, if she’s sensing something in him that sets off her fight or flight response. She hadn’t even known what to do with the soup he handed her (didn’t know how to be taken care of). Perhaps it’s something about his presence that makes her seem like a bird about to flit away. She’s strange and fascinating, and he’s never known a woman like her. Adela had been a transplant to London like him - she arrived from St. Lucia just a few months before they met. Jean Milburn is not a transplant, settled in her home perched atop a hill, hidden in the tops of the ash, oak and beech. There’s an irony in her home in the ancient forests of Wales, when everything about her is so ethereal. That the trees surrounding her house have had roots in the Forest of Dean for hundreds of years, and he wondered how anchored Jean was to the earth surrounding her. How tethered she was.

_ You look much more threatening than you are, Jakob. _ Adela had laughed when she and Jakob went on their first date and found that he opened doors for her, pulled out her chair for her, thought carefully before answering her questions.  _ You’re warmer than I expected, too. I haven’t been this warm since I left home, you know. I didn’t think I’d find the right place on this island to make my home - the sun doesn’t shine enough here for all trees to grow. Have you noticed that?  _ He smiled, offering back that at home the sun doesn’t set in the summer, but then it doesn’t rise in the winter.  _ Are you saying that maybe your Nordic trees are heartier than the ones that grow in the Caribbean? _ Jakob laughed, letting her words take hold in his mind before answering. She speaks in a musical way that he can’t match yet, not in English anyway. (Nor in Vietnamese, for that matter.) 

_ I think we can set roots in more places than we think. We can find someone to help us when we are not at home. Home is not the place we left, but the place we came to.  _ Jakob knows there is no point in letting fear or hesitation play a part in his life. Not now, not when he’s still unmoored, still seeking a place to set down his roots. He’s willing to open to Adela; he can’t help but open to Adela. He can sense she’s sturdy, knows that his own strength mirrors hers. (Ola reminds him so much of Adela: a small woman with a deeply grounded presence, as if she was growing straight from the earth below her.) He has been impulsive before: leaving Sweden, getting nearly all of his tattoos. Marrying Adela after knowing her for only two months is the most impulsive he’s been when another person’s heart is involved. Deep in their hearts, they know it’s the right thing to do. Two people far from the homes they left, grounded together in honesty and a deep need for home where they’ve arrived. Their love blossoms so quickly, sprouting up from the floor of their first flat together, in Brixton. Knowing that they are settling here together, building something permanent within each other’s hearts is freeing for Jakob. Being so firmly tethered to someone is more uplifting than he could have imagined. Adela was holding him firmly to Earth, and that made his heart and his love for her soar above them like a kite. When she is offered a new position, far from the city, in the Wye Valley, Jakob knows that they can take the life they’ve planted together and expertly replant it wherever they need to go. And now they needed to make room for more roots: Adela whispered to him one night that he was going to be a Pappa soon.

Jean was the first woman he’s kissed since Adela. Jean was the first woman he felt something for since his wife. Every time he touched Adela he knew he was touching something real and solid, but even with his arms wrapped tightly around Jean as they kissed, Jakob could not shake the feeling that he was trying to gather a moonbeam in his hand. She was breathless as they broke away, their kiss interrupted by the very urgent inquiries for  _ Otis’ mum?  _ by one of her son’s friends. She’s standing so close to him that Jakob thinks he can feel her heart racing, fleeting like a bird. A hummingbird, her wings moving so quickly he couldn’t even see them, just feel their vibrations in the air. How can he feel something so palpable between them when Jean herself flickered so?

Jakob remembered taking Adela to their house for the first time, how she had smiled and said that it looked like the house had been part of the forest for years. That she loved how the trees accepted it into their space in the world. How Jakob had saved them the trouble of having to let their own roots adjust by finding a house that was already firmly planted in the Wye Valley. They knew it would be more challenging there than in London: they were clearly foreigners, they did not have the intrinsic support of neighbors and friends to make their lives easier. They had to be firm in their life together in their home to thrive here, to allow their baby to set down his or her roots. Jakob makes the difficult decision to abandon his love of working in the food industry, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to provide the security for his wife and family in such an insecure industry. Adela indulges in his need to expand his culinary horizons with cookbooks and free reign over the kitchen (as long as he promises to make her phở like he did in Brixton. He does one better by learning how to make Lambi and pepper pot to remind her of St. Lucia).  _ You’re a provider, Jakob. A builder, a fixer.  _ She’s thrilled to see him settle into a stable career as a plumber that gives him the chance to serve others, and still come home to her and their children: first Rikke and then Ola. 

Adela was right in her prediction that Nordic trees were heartier than the trees in the Caribbean. She’s diagnosed with cancer when Rikke is 13 and Ola is just ten. They seek treatments, both aggressive and gentle holistic. She told him that callaloo soup, just like her mother used to make, is better than the chemotherapy. (He knows it’s not, but he trusts its healing powers enough to make it whenever his girls are sick. He thinks maybe he could tell Jean all about his soup, the best soup, and how it once helped his wife when she was very sick.) Jakob had been scared that cancer would eat his wife from the inside out, that he would have to watch her suffer. He does have to watch her weaken and die, but he’s struck by how strong she still is, how secure Adela is in the knowledge that she’s going to die, that she’s going to return to the earth where her roots were. She had told him once, in a conversation about religion and the afterlife, that she wanted to come back as an ash tree.  _ I read once that the druids thought the earth and sky were held together by ash trees. I’d like to help hold the earth and sky together, wouldn’t you? _ They also had quickly learned how impossible it was to dig around an ash tree’s root system, and now Jakob wants to tease her that she wants to come back as a tree that will make it impossible for him to plant a garden on one side of their house. Even in her weakest state, Adela laughs, her eyes closed.  _ We’ve built so much together, Jakob. Promise me you’ll keep building? Help Rikke and Ola settle like we did, wherever home is for them. Find someone else to have your life with, someone else who needs you to provide for her.  _

Jean Milburn needs someone to provide for her, he can see that. He suspects her ex-husband didn’t offer much in the way of sturdy roots, and he knows that she needs a place where she rest safely. But she blows all around him, she brightens for him as they roll around in her bed together, as she screams his name in pleasure. He can feel some of the same warmth Adela had for him as they lay together afterwards, their post-coital bliss over all-too-quickly. He suspects that she’s terrified of how white-hot she had been for him, and he feels her flickering already in the kitchen. He’s surprised at how smart she is, how obviously capable she is at her job, and how very wrong she is about him and his ideals about monogamy.  _ Monogamy is too binding. _ He knows then that Jean Milburn never knew the freedom in safety, how the love and life he planted securely with his wife and had allowed them to grow taller and stronger together. That just like the trees around them, the stability of monogamy had allowed him to spread his branches in a place that he never knew would be home.

He suspects Jean needs someone to help her build, despite not knowing what it was she wanted. He also knows that for right now, he cannot hold her in his hands. Right now she’s only flame and air.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the things I love about Sex Education and its casting department is that there was no conversation about the fact that Jakob is a white guy from Sweden and Ola is a woman of color. That being said, it made me think about Jakob's wife, and where she may have been from and what their life together was like. Jakob is by far the most emotionally available and honest adult on the show, and there's something so grounded about him, which I think is what both intrigues and scares Jean. Jean is ready to fly away at any moment, despite the fact that Jakob obviously wants to give her a place to stay. This was my attempt at fleshing out Jakob's backstory, and the strong relationship and home he obviously built with his wife.
> 
> (I've also noticed that most people think Ola is the older child, but I thought his other daughter would have to be old enough to drive, too, so I made her older than Ola. I guess she would be 19 at the time Sex Education is taking place.)


End file.
